Itineraries 2013 Vol. 2: Film
Contents
“Romance and New Relationships in Later Life” by Connie Goldman
“Knowing When to Resist, When to Accept” by Jim Vanden Bosch
“Films as Guidance for Positive Aging” by Harry R. Moody
“Keeping the Little Things Little…” by John Sullivan
“How to Watch a Movie” by Bolton Anthony
“The Gunfighter Grows Old” by Steve Taylor
“The Skinny on Cooperative Householding” Review by Marilyn Hartman
“A Village Far Outside Shanghai” A poem by Earl Cooper
50 Films for the Second Half of Life by Bolton Anthony
“Romance and New Relationships in Later Life” by Connie Goldman
I recently asked some people between the ages of 20 and 45 what they thought about 70-year-old people hugging, touching, having sexual relations, living together. Some laughed, some just smiled. One person responded, “Aren’t people over 65 beyond all that?”
Well… No.
Love, intimacy, sex, and building meaningful relationships are not the exclusive domain of the young. Older couples who have found new life partners in their later years have generously told me their stories. There’s an independence of spirit that comes with aging that surprises younger people. A woman in her 70s confirmed this for many when she told me, “We make our own plans on how we live together. Why at my age would I give a hoot about what people think?”
And sex?
Alive and well according to the 22 couples I interviewed for my book, Late Life Love — Romance and New Relationships in Later Years. Human needs for closeness, touch, and intimacy remain with us until our last breath. Older people embrace, kiss, and make love. Sexuality is alive and thriving in folks with big bellies and gray hair. Touching, caressing, enjoying each other’s bodies offer intimacy and pleasure. For some, the physical relationship isn’t what it was in their younger days, yet many have told me that both their lovemaking and emotional lives get richer and deeper in late-life relationships.
Here are just a few brief quotes extracted from my interviews:
It was apparent when we first met that we had a physical attraction for one another and that has never left us. We can’t keep our hands off each other even when we’re watching television. You can be mature and still be romantic, you know!
The common joke is that children of any age don’t want to think of their parents knowing about sex or doing anything sexual, but we enjoy exploring our physical relationship in a lot of ways.
I don’t have any inhibitions, and I enjoy sex more now than when I was younger. I do like to have sex in the dark because if I catch sight of my arm with all the skin hanging down, it’s distracting. When I see it I think, “Who is this old lady?” Anyway, we continue to have a very romantic relationship, and I love that.
We may not have sex the same way as when we were younger, but we have good physical relations that are satisfying and enjoyable, with tender intimacy. We enjoy each other’s body a great deal. We sleep nude, and a night rarely goes by without touching and cuddling.
Until fairly recently one would have been hard pressed to corroborate this reality with films. The film Innocence (2000), by Australian filmmaker Paul Cox, is perhaps the first to break an unspoken taboo with its sensitive portrayal of late-life intimacy. Its two main characters — Andreas (Charles Tingwell) who is recently widowed, and Claire (Julia Blake), who is still married to her first husband John — reconnect after more than 40 years apart. They discover that the intense passion they shared when they were young is still there, and they soon become involved in a rekindled love affair.
The film offers us ruminations on love which are both poignant and perceptive. “Each stage of life has its own kind of love,” Andreas observes. “Now it’s deeper, pared down to the essentials. We spend years destroying that part of love that gives us pain. I love you a lot less selfishly now.”
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Andreas and Claire also find that this time around, there are more complications. Indeed, the joys and pleasures of re-mating in the later years come with what I call leftovers from other lives — adult children, grandchildren, health concerns, previous living situation, sexual expectations, financial situations, divorce, caregiving experience, grief and loss. Every couple, with eyes wide open, with maturity and wisdom, must make adjustments and compromises in dealing with these “leftovers” and arrive at their own individual arrangement.
Some marry, others live together and don’t plan to marry, many have a committed relationship but live in their own houses, some live in different cities and plan regular times each month to be together. Some have adult children who don’t approve of the new relationship and won’t acknowledge it. Others have joyfully integrated the two families.
“We’ve been together three years. A few months ago we had a spiritual commitment ceremony. Our lawyer advised us not to get legally married and the financial advisor told me the same thing. So we decided not to officially marry, but we both felt a deep commitment about the relationship. Neither of us considered that it was a temporary thing that could be dissolved any time, so James approached a retired Episcopal minister to bless us in a ceremony. We know that one of us will most probably be taking care of the other at some point. But we have today and we bless and enjoy each day we have together.”
“When my wife died we had been married 48 years. About ten years before she died she was already ill with diabetes, Parkinson’s, heart problems, the whole works. One day she wrote a letter and told me it was to be opened when she died. I opened the letter after she passed away and found she had made two requests. The first thing she asked in the letter was that when our three children came over we were all to go and have a Chinese meal and she specified the restaurant. We had long before given up Chinese restaurants because the sodium in the food was bad for her health. The second request was that I was to mourn her for a week and then go out and find somebody to be my partner. The message was simple — I’m dead, you’re alive, live.”
“Was I looking for a husband? Absolutely not! I was still grieving for my husband. We had been married for so many years and we understood each other’s rhythms, likes, and dislikes. And I have my work, my small business, and that keeps me busy and active all day. It took quite a while before I realized I was lonely. You can’t work all the time. Oh yes, I have lots of friends, but I was starting to want a companion, a friend with whom to share things, experiences, meals, the day-to-day stuff.
“I don’t think we’ll marry but whether or not he was my husband, I’d take care of Mike if he was ill. It wouldn’t depend on us being married. We never know what the future holds. Mike could be taking care of me. Our relationship gives me more than money ever could give me. I’d rather have Mike next to me in bed than a pile of money!”
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We do indeed “never know what the future holds.” The prospect of losing one’s beloved — through death or, perhaps worst, through a mental deterioration that obliterates the “person” we loved — is no longer remote as it seemed in our youth. Marge’s story will resonate with someone you know or possibly live with. She’s 83 years old, her partner Ed is 87. Marge had been divorced for over three decades; Ed was the primary caregiver for his wife who died 16 years ago.
“Our families knew each other years ago when we both had young children. One day we reconnected unexpectedly in a super market. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ he said and five hours later the conversation was still going strong.”
Marge and Ed now have a committed relationship, live together, and share their lives and families. They are also sharing Ed’s quickly deteriorating memory. It all began with confusion about driving, and Ed was forced to give up his car keys. Then he began forgetting what day it was, who was coming over to visit, whether it was dinnertime, or if they had already had their meal. Yes, it was early Alzheimer’s; and yes; everyone’s relationship with Ed is quickly changing. The home he’ll be moving into shortly is being checked out thoroughly by the family. And Ed, and Marge as well, soon will be living a different life.
But, even at this extremity, there may be lessons for love to teach us. In the film, Away from Her, by Canadian director Sarah Polley, Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) have been married for 44 years. They live in an isolated farmhouse in Ontario, Canada, where they enjoy cross-country skiing and sex. Then one evening Fiona puts the frying pan away in the refrigerator. At a dinner with friends, she reaches for a bottle but can’t remember the word wine. Later, she says, ”I think I’m beginning to disappear.” She has too much respect for herself, and too much pity for Grant, to subject him to what seems her certain decay. She makes a decision on her own to enter Meadowlake, a residence facility for Alzheimer patients. As the disease consumes her and her memory and attachment to her husband fades, the couple faces a transition from lovers to strangers. The film is honest, brilliantly acted, and speaks with honesty of the sacrifices that often come with love.
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I want to round out my two “viewing suggestions” with a third film. My Afternoons With Margueritte — by French director Jean Becker — is a “love story,” but one very different from the other love stories I’ve been discussing. In a chance encounter, Germain (Gérard Depardieu), a man in his 50s who is looked on as the village idiot, meets Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus), an articulate, highly intelligent and very frail woman. Between Germain and Margueritte, there are 40 years and 200 pounds difference. Margueritte is sitting on the park bench, reading aloud excerpts from a novel. Germain is lured by her passion for life and the magic of literature from which he has always felt excluded. Over time, their afternoons together transform both their lives and start them on a new journey.
The deep friendship in the movie is a story of a deep human love — what it could be and probably should be, if we reach out beyond ourselves. Of course it isn’t the same love story as couples re-mating, but it’s one example of our need to care about someone special and to have them care about us. It is reassuring to realize that the particular gift of late-life love is a gift that may await any of us.
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Each interview I’ve collected, each couple’s experience, each story is individual and unique. Couples have their own adjustments and compromises in dealing with finances, adult children, and living situations, deteriorating health and growing dependence. Late- life love — along with the challenges, joys, and pleasures of re-mating in the later years — continue to enrich the lives of so many. A colleague once told me that those of us in the winter of our lives can still find summer. I knew there was truth in that statement when, in my presence, a woman in her 70s said to her 80-year-old partner, “Love me. Hold me in your arms and hold me in your heart.”
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Formerly on the staff of National Public Radio, Connie Goldman is an award-winning radio producer and reporter. For almost 30 years her public radio programs, books, and speaking have been exclusively concerned with the changes and challenges of aging. Grounded in the art of personal stories collected from hundreds of interviews, Connie”s presentations are designed to inform, empower, and inspire. Her message on public radio, in print, and in person is clear — make any time of life an opportunity for new learning, exploring creative pursuits, self-discovery, spiritual deepening, and continued growth. Her books include The Ageless Spirit, Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer, The Gifts of Caregiving: Stories of Hardship, Hope and Healing, Late Life Love: Romance and New Relationships in Late Years, and Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit: The Healing Gifts of Gardening. Visit her Web site at congoldman.org.
“Knowing When to Resist, When to Accept” by Jim Vanden Bosch
“I think of age as an abstraction, not a straightjacket.” This line from Still Mine, a recent feature film, invites us to ponder whether perceptions of aging and elderhood are shifting in American culture and society, and to take note of how images and perceptions of aging and elderhood are being presented today in mainline feature films. There have certainly been more films recently that deal with aging characters and aging-related themes. Aging, we could say, has “come of age” in our society — at least in terms of our awareness of it. A society’s attitudes and concerns are often reflected in its feature films. With baby boomers now crossing over into the land of elderhood at the rate of 8,000 to 10,000 a day, many popular films are trying to story-tell what those travelers are experiencing as they navigate that uneven, uncertain terrain. As Paula Span, columnist for the New York Times said this month in her blog, The New Old Age, “Not long ago, I could name the really excellent recent movies about aging on one hand. Now I am running out of fingers.”
To age successfully requires knowing when to resist and overcome, and when to gracefully accept, the changes brought on by life’s aging course. This is often a difficult endeavor. This struggle is what makes films about aging, if they are honest and well-produced, so fascinating to watch. We get to have an extended “conversation” with someone else’s experience and story. We can be challenged by that story, or we can simply sit back and enjoy the narrative. A good film, unless we simply want to be shocked or titillated, converses with us at an honest and emotive level. It invites us to see ourselves, our experience (or our imaginable experience) reflected in the story being played out on the screen. If we have any curiosity at all about how our lives might play out, these films provide rich opportunities for us to see, feel, and reflect on that.
For reasons I have not yet figured out, most of us are attracted to drama in the stories we seek out. Filmmakers, therefore, present us with stories that contain a dramatic arc, usually involving a conflict and then a resolution of some kind. (Sometimes the story effectively stops short of a resolution, and we are left to ponder the outcome.) One of the “dramas” that often accompanies growing older is health related. An illness becomes the invasive “enemy” against which the characters in the story struggle. The resolution comes either in overcoming the threat or in “making peace” with it.
Two recent films that give us rich stories about how elders handle this threat are Amourand Still Mine. The films are similar in the arc of the stories they present, but are extremely different in how their characters handle the threat. In both films a couple struggles with the cognitive decline of one of the partners. In Still Mine, Craig (James Cromwell) and Irene (Genevieve Bujold) Morrison, married for 61 years, still live in their well-worn two-story farm house in New Brunswick. Near the beginning of the film we see evidences of Irene’s short-term memory slipping. One of Craig’s responses to this (at 87 years of age) is to use his long-honed carpentry skills to single-handedly build them a new smaller single-story house that will better accommodate Irene’s deteriorating condition. Visually, the film is open and bright, with many of its scenes shot outside. The characters are also open-hearted and honest — even when they are in disagreement with each other. (Both Cromwell and Bujold do a fine job of portraying an older rural Canadian couple.)
In the process of building the house Craig runs afoul of a Provincial building inspector by not always adhering to the minutia of the building codes. This conflict builds throughout the film and threatens the finishing of the house, even as Irene’s condition worsens. Craig and Irene’s grown children also weigh in with their concerns over what is happening, and they worry together over whether to try to convince Craig to follow a different course in meeting Irene’s needs. The film is refreshingly multidimensional in how it shows this couple facing the challenges of memory loss. In so many mainstream films, dementia is misunderstood and portrayed as a condition that destroys one’s personhood. In Still Mine the focus is on the more gradual decline that initially only affects Irene’s short-term memory, not her personhood. But neither is the reality of the decline glossed over. In one scene Craig and Irene are lying in bed together and Irene says “What if I forget everything?” Craig responds, after a few seconds to take in this potential reality, “You’ll still be my Irene.”
The recent film, Amour, by acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, shows a couple dealing with a more immediately severe health issue. The tone of Amour is radically opposite that of Still Mine.1 With the exception of two scenes at the beginning of the film, the entire story unfolds within the apartment of Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), an older French couple. Early in the film, Anne develops stroke-like symptoms. An attempt to deal with them in the hospital fails; the symptoms get progressively worse. At first, just her left side is affected. She can talk but needs help with walking and getting in and out of bed. After returning from the hospital, Anne extracts a promise from Georges that he will not place her back in the hospital. A second stroke soon follows and leaves her incontinent, unable to talk without great effort, and mentally confused. Georges provides loving and steadfast care for her, but is eventually worn down by the effort.
Haneke’s previous films have often focused on the violence that humans can do to each other, or on the threat of that violence. In Amour, a different kind of threat is imposed not by another person but by an increasingly debilitating illness. Rarely has a narrative feature film tracked with such single-minded focus the deterioration that a stroke can bring to an aging body and the emotional effects this deterioration has. One should not be misled, however, as many reviewers seem to have been, with “love” in the title. Amour is at its core a film about one couple’s descent into a self-isolating cavern of caregiving, and a shocking conclusion to that descent.
From a technical standpoint, the film is masterfully done. The acting is superb. The scenes are allowed to play out in long takes within steady and beautifully composed camera frames. There is no external music track to help “guide” the viewer’s emotional response to the story. There is no complicated or tricky story line to appeal to our attention-deficit culture — but my attention was held irrevocably throughout the entire film.
Amour also diverges radically and refreshingly from the vast number of films that present a sentimentalized or sugary vision of growing older. The protagonists in these sugar films either “overcome” the threat of aging’s reality with youth-like revitalization, or they become the object of pity or comedy. The vision presented in Amour has none of that. Instead, it takes us to the extreme in the other direction. The film is severe in its relentless portrayal of the toll taken by Anne’s deteriorating condition, insensitive in its absence of any kind of social support for Anne and Georges as they bear the unrelenting burden, and brutal in its ending. My biggest criticism of the film is that its story line seems to lack any cultural awareness of palliative care options that would have been widely available to a middle-class Parisian couple like Anne and Georges. In later scenes of the film, Anne is often crying out in pain. Why Georges does not seek out hospice care to help Anne with pain management at this point is the huge unanswered question in this film. Perhaps this simply would have been too much of a diversion from the dark ending that is more in character with Haneke’s filmmaking. Finding another way to resolve the pain and isolation for Anne and Georges would have subverted the enduring interest Haneke seems to have with the human experience of pain, isolation, and violence (as seen in many of his other films: The Seventh Continent; Benny’s Video; Cache; The Piano Teacher; Funny Games; The White Ribbon).
The film, therefore, also lacks any sense of grace in the story’s resolution. In the early part of the film, before Anne’s second stroke, there is a sense of grace. Throughout much of the film Georges conveys loving and respectful feelings for Anne — the kind that are garnered in a long and rich marital relationship. There are also momentary interludes of wonderful music (both Anne and Georges are musicians) and some occasional playful banter between Anne and Georges. But these are always cut short or followed swiftly by a scene of decline, as if to drive home the point that music and joy will not persist. They will be cut down. After Anne’s disability increases and takes away her sense of dignity, the film becomes steeped in a cheerless plodding towards the exit. The overall tone of the film becomes one of feeling-lessness, especially on the part of Georges. He becomes stoic, numb, and self-isolating as a caregiver in the later stages of Anne’s deteriorating condition.
This is where Still Mine presents a wonderful counterpoint to Amour. Craig and Irene are not isolated as they face the loss of Irene’s cognitive abilities. While Craig is an independent and resourceful person, he also has a supportive family and community to help him take on the increased work load when Irene’s health is faltering. After Irene has a serious fall, for example, one of the couple’s friends insists on bringing a prepared meal for Craig and Irene once a week. Two of Craig and Irene’s adult children are also at hand, and provide help — when Craig will accept it. In this way the film is infused with a sense of grace that is missing from Amour. Craig, however, is not portrayed without his faults. He is often brusque and prone to angry outbursts. Yet, he also recognizes these lapses and seeks forgiveness for them. In a climactic scene, Irene resists going into the house at night to go to bed. Craig, after repeatedly cajoling her, finally physically drags her up the steps and into the house, while she screams in protest. Later that night she gets up out of bed, trips on a shoe and breaks her hip. In retelling the event to his children, Craig is remorseful. “You don’t just drag somebody,” he says.
The health issues faced by Irene are initially not as severe and limiting as those affecting Anne in Amour, but after breaking her hip she does end up in the hospital and then has an extended stay in a rehab facility. This lengthy separation is painful for both Irene and Craig, especially for Irene, because she often forgets why she needs to be there. Craig accepts the news of the need for Irene to be in the facility for two months with stoic grace. “Irene and I have been married for 61 years and have never been apart for more than a few days at a time. But if this is what is necessary, well then, that’s just the way it will have to be.”
Eventually, Craig finishes the new house, and Irene comes home. Still Mine is based on a true story. There was a real life Craig Morrison who was harassed and brought to court many times during a two–year period by the Provincial building inspectors. In 2010 they ultimately demanded that the court forcibly remove Craig and Irene from their new house, that the house be bulldozed, and that Mr. Morrison be found in contempt of court and imprisoned. Fortunately the presiding Justice disagreed, saying that he was not going to send a 91-year-old man to jail and his wife to a nursing home.
Both Amour and Still Mine are powerful films and will undoubtedly engage you in self-reflection and discussion on the issues they so contrastingly portray. These two films also stand in sharp contrast to many of the other recent entertaining but rather fluffy films depicting various aspects of elderhood. Films like Quartet and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or Clint Eastwood’s Trouble with the Curve are fun to watch, but really provide very little in terms of deeper reflections and conversations about the meanings and challenges of life’s aging/changing course.
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Notes
1 The comments on Amour that follow are elaborated from the review I did of the film in the June, 2013 issue of The Gerontologist: Volume 53, Number 3.
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Jim Vanden Bosch is a filmmaker and the founder and Executive Director of Terra Nova Films, a not-for-profit company specializing in producing and distributing films and videos on a wide variety of aging-related issues. He has produced several award- winning videos, including a recent series on elder abuse and a series on geriatric healthcare for the American Journal of Nursing. Vanden Bosch is also an associate editor in the arts and humanities section of The Gerontologist, the main academic journal of the Gerontological Society of America. In this position he writes reviews of mainstream feature films that deal with aging themes. He also presents frequently at conferences, using a multimedia approach that incorporates relevant video stories into a thematic PowerPoint presentation. He holds an MA degree in Film and Television from the University of Iowa.
“Films as Guidance for Positive Aging” by Harry R. Moody
Films can offer powerful images of positive aging,(1) and, by examining them closely, we can find a counter-narrative to the negative images of age so prevalent in our culture.(2) In this discussion, we consider four films, Wild Strawberries, Groundhog Day, It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Carol.
The 1957 film Wild Strawberries has been called the masterpiece of Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman.(3) It is repeatedly cited on critics’ lists of the 10 greatest films ever made. Wild Strawberries is also the greatest film about aging ever made and the most profound statement of life-review in the medium of film. The film’s message and meaning are conveyed by powerful dreams experienced by the hero of the film, Prof. Isaak Borg, played by silent film director Victor Sjöström. In the film, Prof. Borg is an academic physician who experiences a profound life-review through a series of dreams during a single day’s drive with his daughter-in-law as they travel to the city of Lund where the doctor is to receive an honorary degree, celebrating his 50 years of medical practice.
Dr. Borg’s day begins as he awakens from a dream, a dream that has been called the most famous dream in film history. It is a scene dense with symbols of coffins, clocks, and empty streets, an atmosphere Bergman himself has called an homage to German expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis (1927). This dream features a runaway carriage, conveying an ominous message of impending death and inescapable fate. This first dream recalls Dr. Robert Butler’s original account of life-review as a process of encountering the past triggered by a sense of imminent death. Later dreams in the film explicitly display a pattern of life-review in which Dr. Borg encounters unresolved guilt and conflicts from the past. The explicit life-review sequence begins with a nostalgic dream set in a summer cottage from his childhood. Prof. Borg awakens from the dream sometimes confused between past and present, a point emphasized by Bergman since the very same actress portrays the girl from his youth in the past as well as a passenger in the car he’s driving in the present. The dream evokes feelings of loss and regret for a life unlived and the “road not taken.”
Perhaps the most disturbing dream in the sequence is one where Borg is brought into a lecture hall, scene of his adult triumphs and mastery as an academic physician. In this lecture hall he is asked devastating questions that evoke his helplessness, guilt, and vulnerability in the face of the past and his empty life at present. In this dream he must face his own emotional isolation in devastating terms. The last dream vision, if we may call it that, no longer reflects the guilt and anguish of Borg’s past. The dream comes after Borg has attempted to reconcile his son Evald with Evald’s wife Marianne. As Borg sinks into sleep, his mind wanders into the past again. In this final dream, Borg is back in childhood, at a family picnic at a lake. The mood is nostalgic and affirmative of Borg’s life and memories, a fitting conclusion and a moving note of redemption and reconciliation between past and present. The journey of life-review through dreams has achieved what Erikson would call ego-integrity, moving beyond the despair evoked by the opening nightmare that begins the sequence.(4)
Wild Strawberries is a deep exercise in life-review, unfolding through dreams, fantasy, and reminiscence.(5) In a single day, Dr. Borg relives an entire lifetime. For this elder hero, the past remains unfinished. Despite his worldly honors, he experiences through deep subjectivity the poverty of his own existence. Despite past failings, he encounters the possibility of growth and redemption. The film itself is a profound message about hope for the last stage of life.
Bergman directed Wild Strawberries in 1957, when he himself was far from old age but had entered a midlife transition. About the aged Dr. Isak Borg, Bergman would later say, “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through….I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.” Bergman’s work continued throughout his life to explore the darker sides of human life. But, of all his films, Wild Strawberries remains his most life-affirming work.
A film very relevant to aging and lifespan development happens to be a movie with no older characters at all. That film is Groundhog Day, which stars Bill Murray as a cynical television weatherman named Phil Connors who mysteriously is compelled to relive again and again a single day of his life: namely, February 2, Groundhog Day.
Despite being a comedy, the film has been widely seen as having a profound existential or even spiritual message and it has become something of a cult favorite. Harold Ramis, director of the film, is quoted as saying that he has heard from Jesuit priests, rabbis, Buddhists, and people all over the world who find a deep meaning in the film. “At first I would get mail saying, ‘Oh, you must be a Christian, because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian belief… ’ Then rabbis started calling from all over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the Buddhists! Well, I knew they loved it,” evidently because the film depicts the endless cycle of rebirth for which Buddhism offers salvation.
Yet the film does have significance for aging and lifespan development once we recognize that, just like the beloved film It’s a Wonderful Life, the hero is a middle- aged man who has found himself repeating himself endlessly, trapped in his own ego. In the film there is a great dialogue in a bar between the hero, Phil Connors, and a local character named Ralph which sums up the existential dilemma of the film: “Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? Ralph: That about sums it up for me.”
But Groundhog Day is ultimately not a film about “midlife crisis” but is rather a classical redemptive narrative, akin to It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, both significantly holiday season favorites. Ryan Gilbey describes Groundhog Day as a supremely intelligent comedy which commands broad appeal precisely because it does not push any specific “deep” agenda.(6) For example, the film never explains how it is that Phil is trapped into living the same day over and over again. The redemption it promises comes about through genuine love between the two leading characters in the film, Weatherman Phil, and his producer, played by Andie MacDowell.
I have mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life as a “redemptive narrative,” but it also has a kinship with Groundhog Day because the hero, played by James Stewart, is a middle-aged man caught in a life he didn’t plan or expect.(7) Like Phil Conners, George Bailey hoped for something more out of life. But he stayed at home in Bedford Falls while his brother went off to fight in World War II and became a hero. George Bailey has abandoned his youthful hopes and dreams and now runs the town’s Building and Loan bank, which helps the local townspeople but ends up nearly bankrupt on Christmas eve. In despair, George Bailey tries to commit suicide by leaping off a bridge, but he is saved by his guardian angel, Clarence.
At the point of this near-death experience, the hero is in such despair that he bitterly expresses the wish that he had never been born. For the rest of the film he engages in a compelling counterfactual life-review in which he is shown what the world would have been like if he had never been born. In that case, he would not have married his sweetheart Mary (played by Donna Reed) and life in Bedford Falls would have been worse. In this counterfactual narrative, it also turns out that the town of Bedford Falls would have become Pottersville, under the control of the ominous power of banker Henry Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore). The result of this imaginary life-review is that by the end of the film, George Bailey runs back to the bridge and now wants to live again. Clarence’s exercise, fostering an imaginary life-review, has done its intended work. At the end, George is reunited with Mary and his children, and the financial problems are resolved when the whole community comes together to contribute money to make it whole. In the final scene, all the leading characters come together to sing “Auld Lang Syne.”
Along with It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol is also a redemptive narrative, and we can now approach that cherished classic with new eyes. The novel by Charles Dickens has been interpreted in many ways, including, for example, as a case study in clinical depression and its resolution, as Gene Cohen has done. I approach the novel and the film as an illustration of what I have described as the five stages of the soul: namely, Call, Search, Struggle, Breakthrough, and Return.(8)
The film, like Dickens’ novel, begins with elder Ebeneezer Scrooge going to bed and being awakened by the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge initially rejects this Call, which is, at one level, a dream, but, more deeply, a reminder of mortality to the elderly Scrooge, a reminder that he dismisses. In due course, he is persuaded of the reality of this supernatural visitation and so he embarks on a process of self-interrogation, a Search for guidance, which for Scrooge comes about through life-review of Christmas past and present. In this Search he lets himself be guided by the ghosts who enable him to see his life as it really was. Thus, Scrooge revisits the scenes of his youth and confronts the failures of his life and eventually, under the guidance of the ghost of Christmas present, he is able to see Christmas present as it is experienced by his clerk Bob Cratchit. The contrast between Christmas past and Christmas present, between the young and the old Scrooge, is the heart of his Struggle, which reaches its peak when he is guided by the ghost of Christmas future. At that point, witnessing his own gravestone, Scrooge has his Breakthrough when Scrooge imagines his own future, his own death. His cry of the heart, “Must these things be?” is the point where his dream ends and he wakes up, now back in his own bed on Christmas morning.
Having gone through these stages of the soul, Scrooge is no longer the man he used to be. But one more stage remains, the Return. In the heartwarming end of the film, we see Scrooge back at his office, pretending to be his old, nasty self, when Bob Cratchit comes into work, a bit fearful of the old man, even on Christmas morning. In the stage of the Return, Scrooge takes the insights from the Breakthrough, and from all the prior stages of the soul, to bring spiritual growth back into ordinary life. As the Zen masters say, after Enlightenment, we “chop wood and carry water.” And so it is in the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, a redemptive narrative that holds out hope for everyone in the last stage of life.
The final scenes of Wild Strawberries, Groundhog Day, It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol all share a fundamental life-affirming stance, and this is undoubtedly a reason for their enduring popularity. But I have tried to argue that these films are much more than simply “sentimental favorites.” Groundhog Day and It’s a Wonderful Life use hypothetical and counterfactual narratives that offer a different, and more positive perspective on finitude and aging. Instead of “midlife crisis” they offer a promise of transcendence that grows out of giving up illusion and fantasy. Wild Strawberries and A Christmas Carol both have elder heroes who struggle with what Erik Erikson called the polarity of ego-integrity versus despair. This perspective is the fundamental challenge that Jungians call individuation: becoming the person I was meant to be. All four of these films offer guidance on overcoming despair and give promise of the “gero-transcendence”(9) much needed as we look for new directions for positive aging.
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Notes
1 Amir Cohen-Shalev, Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in Film, Sussex Academic Press, 2012.
2 Margaret Gullette, Margaret, Aged by Culture, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
3 For the screen play of “Wild Strawberries” itself, see Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, trans. Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. See Philip French and Kersie, French, Wild Strawberries, British Film Institute, 1995. For critical essays on the film see also Peter Cowie’s thoughtful commentary, part of the Criterion Collection, available at: criterion.com/current/posts/186-wild-strawberries.
4 See Erik Erikson “A Life History: Revisitation and Reinvolvement,” available at: haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/erikson.strawberries.html.
5 For more on dreams and aging, see H.R. Moody, “Dreams and the Coming of Age,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, (43:2), July, 2011.
6 Ryan Gilbey, Groundhog Day, London: British Film Institute, 2004, and Ryan Gilbey, , “Groundhog Day: The Perfect Comedy, For Ever,” The Guardian ( Feb. 7, 2013), at: guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/07/groundhog-day-perfect-comedy-for-ever. See also Alex Kuzcynski, Alex, “Groundhog Almighty” New York Times (December 7, 2003).
7 Jeanine Basinger, The It’s a Wonderful Life Book, Knopf, 1986.
8 Harry R. Moody and David Carroll, The Five Stages of the Soul: Charting the Spiritual Passages that Shape Our Lives, Anchor, 1998.
9 Lars Tornstam, Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging, Springer, 2005.
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Harry R. Moody, Ph.D., recently retired as Vice President and Director of Academic Affairs for AARP in Washington, DC. He previously served as Executive Director of the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College and Chairman of the Board of Elderhostel (now Road Scholar). Dr. Moody is the author of over 100 scholarly articles, as well as a number of books including: Abundance of Life: Human Development Policies for an Aging Society, Ethics in an Aging Society, and Aging: Concepts and Controversies, a gerontology textbook now in its 7th edition. His most recent book,The Five Stages of the Soul, was published by Doubleday Anchor Books and has been translated into seven languages worldwide. In 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society on Aging; in 2010, the Robert Kahn Award for Successful Aging, from Masterpiece Living, and in 2008 he was named by Utne Reader Magazine as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
“Keeping the Little Things Little…” by John Sullivan
Prologue: A View of Elders
A first sketch of elders is to look at grandparents at their best. I see such grandparents having three tasks relative to the younger people: (1) To keep the little things little and the big things big, (2) to encourage creativity, and (3) to bless the young. Let’s look at each in turn.
Keep the little things little and the big things big
Grandparents can hold in mind what youth does not know: “This too shall pass.” Think of your first rejection, first betrayal, first suffering of injustice. You thought that the world was coming to an end.. But grandparents have a longer view. Though they cannot say so immediately, they know that life will continue and love will reappear. Additionally, by letting go of small and petty actions or incidents, the grandparents allow what is significant to appear.
Encourage creativity
Grandparents do this by encouraging youth not to be fearful, to take risks, to live their own lives, to follow their hearts. Aiding the young to let go of obstacles, the grandparents help the young rediscover their hearts’ desires.
Bless the young
Grandparents let each grandchild know that she or he is unique in all the world, of inestimable worth, most lovable, and beautiful beyond measure. Thus, the young are released from social or cultural definitions that are too small to live in. Young people often see such vital elders as allies, if not co-conspirators.
I am not saying that every grandparent exhibits these virtues. I am not saying that one has to be biologically a grandparent to manifest these traits. Indeed, those who reach a certain age, whether having children or not, can stand toward the next generation in a grandparently way, if they choose. They can see themselves as elders and perform toward the children the three functions I describe. And whether we speak about grandparents at their best or speak about elders, such folk are as unique and surprising as any of us at any age. We can gain a fuller and more textured view by exploring three marvelous films: Monsieur Ibrahim, Central Station, and Captain Abu Raed.
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Monsieur Ibrahim is a 2003 French film with Omar Sharif playing Ibrahim and the young Pierre Boulanger playing the Jewish boy Ibrahim calls “Momo.” Set in Paris during the 1960s, Moses or Moïse Schmdt is a young Jewish boy in the Blue Road suburb of Paris. Ibrahim calls him Momo. At first we see his coming of age, especially with the prostitutes, for whom he struggles to gain money to pay them and give them small gifts. Ibrahim Demirji, “the Arab,” is a small grocery store owner/operator. He says he is from the Golden Crescent; he is Turkish speaking Arabic as well. He reads the Qu’ran, and later we learn he is a Sufi, a member of the mystical strand of Islam. Momo steals from him but Ibrahim tells him: “You owe me nothing. If you must steal, I prefer you steal from me.”
Ibrahim also tells him he prefers Momo 100 times to Momo’s brother, Paulie. (In contrast, Momo’s father had often compared Momo disparagingly to Paulie.) Ibrahim also visits prostitutes: “Heaven is for all of us, he says, “not just for minors.” He teaches Momo to smile, saying “A smile causes happiness.” Walking beside the Seine on Sunday, they encounter dancers. He tells Momo he is a Sufi, “religion interior” says a dictionary that Momo refers to.
Momo’s father is fired. Ibrahim asks Momo, “What does being Jewish mean to you?” “To be depressed all day like my father,” Momo answers. His father leaves and later kills himself. His mother shows up, but Momo does not reveal his identity to his mother.
Momo falls for the Jewish girl Myriam who lives across the way. Her family does not approve and she breaks it off. When he sees her with another boyfriend, Momo throws a record he had bought for her out the window.
Ibrahim is with the boy in the bathhouse, and Momo learns that Ibrahim is circumcised too. Ibrahim buys a car and learns to drive. They are off to Switzerland, Albania, Greece, Istanbul. “Slowness is the key to happiness,” Ibrahim says. Then smells: they go to an Orthodox Church (incense), Catholic Church (candles), Mosque (smell of shoes). On to Anatolia to a sema, a sacred dance of the Whirling Dervish branch of Sufism. “When you dance your heart opens,” says Ibrahim. “The dervishes spin around their hearts like torches.” Also Ibrahim — in the spirit of the Sufi teacher Rumi — tells Momo that our movement is from dust to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to human, and from human to angel.
Ibrahim goes ahead to his village, not sure of what he will find. He finds his wife had died long ago. Ibrahim dies in a car crash and leaves his shop to Momo, who follows Ibrahim’s example, e.g., with shoplifters. We see him at the shop when he is in perhaps his later 20s. When he opens Ibrahim’s Koran he finds two blue flowers. (“I know what is in my Koran,” Ibrahim has said several times.)The French title of the film is Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qu’ran.
Ibrahim is a grandfatherly figure and a mentor in many ways. His Sufi devotion is a religion of the heart — he is free from rules yet acts compassionately throughout. He leaves Momo far more than the shop.
Central Station is a 1998 Brazilian-French film that is set in Rio de Janeiro’s Central Station, with Fernanda Montenegro as Dora and Vinícius de Olivera as the 10-year-old Josué. Dora is an older woman whom we might see as grandmotherly. She is not married and has no children. There is both spunk and sadness in her. She writes letters for the illiterates in Rio’s Central station, and often she does not even mail them. Her friend Irene helps her to decide which letters to mail.
A woman (Ana) — the mother of a young boy Josué — comes to Dora to write a letter to the boy’s father Jesus. Shortly thereafter, the boy’s mother is run over by a bus. At some point Dora invites the boy home, and he finds her unsent letters. Dora first decides to sell the boy to a colleague who claims to arrange adoptions with wealthy families. She receives $1000 and buys a TV. Irene discovers this and berates Dora for crossing a line, and Dora steals Josué back. Taking the original letter with the address, the boy goes in search of his father (Jesus) — Dora puts him on a bus and then decides to go with him. During the journey, the boy runs away and Dora searches. The boy finds her. In one scene, she is lying with her head in his lap while he strokes her hair. They make money by writing letters to a local saint, Dora posts the letters she wrote for the people, and Josué spends some of their money to buy Dora a dress. After a first false track, they finally find, not Jesus but Josué’s brothers Moses and Isaac. Dora puts on her new dress and leaves while the three brothers are sleeping in the same bed. On the bus back to Rio, Dora writes a letter to Josué — she is afraid that he will forget her.
The film is infused with a populist religious spirit. The brothers are Joshua, Moses, and Isaac. There is a quest for Jesus who has gone away but promised to return — or has he returned in the self-realization of Dora?
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Captain Abu Raed1 is a 2007 Jordanian film, with the lead, Abu Raed, played by Nadim Sawalha, and Nour, a female pilot, played by Rana Sultan. As the film opens, we see Abu Raed working as a janitor at the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan. He is taken home on a shuttle with flight crews. He goes to his apartment and glances at a picture of his wife who, we learn, is dead. He reads; he is a literate man who later will boast of having 2000 books. We shall subsequently learn that after losing his son, and then his wife, he lost all motivation and finally became a janitor. At the airport he finds a pilot’s hat discarded in a trash bin. He puts it on as he heads up the long stone stairway to his house. Children see him and ask if he is a pilot. No, he tells them — but they insist. So he begins to tell the children stories of adventures, of flying to great cities: “Once upon a time there was a man, Captain Abu Raed.”
One of the boys, Murad, is unconvinced he is a real pilot and finds a way later to take some children by cab to the airport where they see Abu Raed on hands and knees washing the floor. Meanwhile, a beautiful young female pilot from a wealthy family, Nour, comes to befriend Abu Raed and bring back for him small souvenir trinkets from her travels. Her father is constantly trying to arrange a marriage for her, toward which she is dismissive.
Murad , the boy who in a sense betrayed the children, has an abusive father — abusive to Murad and to Murad’s mother. Abu Raed first reports him, but Murad’s father employs trickery to slip free. Abu Raed persists and bandages Murad’s hand where his father had burned him. As the abuse worsens, Abu Raed, with Nour’s help, takes Murad and the family to her house for shelter. Abu Raed waits for the abusive father in the father’s now empty apartment. The father reaches for a baseball bat, and that is the last we see of Abu Raed.
At the end of the film — time having passed — we see a fairly young man in an airline pilot’s uniform gazing out a window in the airport. A colleague says to him, “Time to go, Captain Murad.”
This film — worthy of watching again and again— has lessons of great humanity.
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Notes
1 Captain Abu Raed has an Elon University connection. Laith Al-Majai was the first recipient of the Queen Noor scholarship to bring a Jordanian student to study at Elon. Laith went on to study film and to graduate. He edited the film Captain Abu Raed. And if the viewer is alert, there is a time in the film where one of the youngsters has an Elon cap on. Laith tells the story that he had dropped the cap while they were filming and one of the boys had picked it up and put it on. In the editing, Laith left the Elon cap in the film, a gesture of sorts to his alma mater.
“How to Watch a Movie” by Bolton Anthony
When investigators debrief the witnesses of a bank robbery, they get wildly divergent accounts of what took place. The explanation seems to be some limit to our mind’s ability to process the unfamiliar — to take in accurately those experiences to which we bring no template, no filter or organizing structure derived from previous experience.
On the other hand, where the mind does have previous experience — and, therefore, expectations — it sees what it expects to see. This problem fascinated the Southern writer, Walker Percy. “Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon… and see it for what it is?” he asks in his wry essay, “Loss of the Creature”:
… because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind… [N]o longer the thing as it confronted the [first Spaniard to see it]; it is rather that which has already been formulated by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon… [and] now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!”
I found these matters particularly compelling during the early 1980s when I was completing a doctorate in education. One’s theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge — one’s epistemology — animates whatever educational system you construct. During that same period, I was also experimenting a bit with the mind-altering properties of marijuana and — under the influence — watched Ryan’s Daughterby the great British director, David Lean. Though his preceding films, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), had won Lean Academy Awards, Ryan’s Daughter (1970) was a flawed effort — “Lean’s red-headed stepson,” as one critic phrased it.
In the movie, set in 1916 in an isolated village in Ireland, Robert Mitchum plays the local schoolmaster and Sarah Mills, his precocious student. When she falls in love with him, Mitchum warns her: She loves Dickens and Tolstoy and Beethoven and the dazzling world he has opened to her — not him. He is nothing like them; he is (the truth be known) boring. I watched the movie expecting a reversal. Mitchum always played the anti-hero, not some milksop. After 45 minutes it dawned on me that no reversal was coming. I had been watching a movie that didn’t exist, a movie shaped entirely by my expectations.
Experimenting further (this time without benefit of cannabis, I allowed my former wife to lead me — blindfolded — into a theater, plop me down in a seat, and remove the blindfold only after the movie titles had ended. I then proceeded to have one of the most memorable movie experiences of my life, watching Tender Mercies. Since my blindfolded experiment, I assiduously avoid reading reviews before seeing a movie. I also suspect that my often intense enjoyment of foreign language films derives from the lack of expectations that get created if you’ve seen the actor in another role.
Late bloomer that I was, I had begun my foray in consciousness expansion more than a decade after most of my peers. They had “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out” during the turbulent 1960s. What we were all seeking was access to experiences that engaged us at a level deeper than the mind — deeper than the play of ideas, for example, that opened this article. We somehow knew that “the heart had its reasons of which reason knew nothing.” That was what we wanted to get at.
Well, for all us aging boomers, myself included, there’s good news. We can resume the search and dabble again in altered states of consciousness: “Aging changes consciousness more surely than any narcotic,” Theodore Roszak, the social critic who chronicled the coming of age of the boomers and coined the word “counterculture,” assures us:
[T]he greatest consciousness-transforming agent of all, in fact, comes to us from within our own experience and as naturally as breathing. It is the experience of aging, which brings with it new values and visions, none of them grounded in competition and careerism, none of them beholden to the marketplace.
Roszak writes of “a driving desire to find meaning in our existence that grows stronger as we approach death.” The questions which engage our passion are those which speak directly to our hearts. In Tender Mercies, Max Sledge, the alcoholic country music singer played by Robert Duvall, is offered a chance at redemption when a young widow and her son, Sonny, take him in. Near the end of the movie, after his own daughter has been killed in an automobile accident, he ponders the awful action of grace in his life:
I was almost killed once in a car accident. I was drunk and I ran off the side of the road and I turned over four times. And they took me out of that car for dead, but I lived. I prayed last night to know why I lived and she died, but I got no answer to my prayers. I still don’t know why she died and I lived. I don’t know the answer to nothin’; not a blessed thing. I don’t know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, married me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny’s daddy died in the war. My daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why?
These are questions which cannot be answered. They are questions which must be lived. It seems to me that is the task of later life.
“The Gunfighter Grows Old” by Steve Taylor
John Wayne’s last film, The Shootist, opened in late August of 1976. It was widely seen at the time as John Wayne’s epitaph. Working with one lung, coughing and wheezing, frequently absent from the set with one ailment or another, Wayne nevertheless delivered the sort of performance that cemented his status not just as one of the preeminent movie stars of his day, but one of its finest actors as well.
Opening with clips from earlier Wayne westerns, mostly directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford, the film marches with almost biblical solemnity through the final eight days of the life of J. B. Books, a legendary gunfighter. Books has returned to Carson City, Nevada, on January 1, 1901, the day of Queen Victoria’s death, to seek a second opinion from his old friend Doc Hostetler (James Stewart). Hostetler confirms the diagnosis: advanced cancer.
Books has returned to a town that offers him precious little hospitality, a bustling place that is too busy striving for modernity and respectability. It has electricity and paved streets and a trolley car. The horse that pulls the trolley is, in fact, soon to go the way of Books himself, an anachronism of the Old West for which the new century has little use.
Books’ determination to live out his final days in peace and quiet is continually frustrated by the equally fierce determination of the town’s various opportunists to cash in on his newsworthy demise. A sinuous journalist wants the last in-depth interview. An unctious undertaker (John Carradine) promises a glorious sendoff until Books reveals that he’s wise to the scam. A former love (Sheree North) drops in with an offer of marriage — and a book contract from the aforementioned journalist who proposes to ghost-write an authorized biography “by the widow.” When Books points out that she knows nothing about his life, she says it doesn’t matter, they’ll just make up a bunch of exciting lies. Books’ disgust is palpable.
Hostetler has steered Books to the boarding house of the recently widowed Mrs. Rogers (Lauren Bacall), who is initially uneasy about having a person of Books’ notoriety under her roof. But their frosty relationship develops into an easy friendship during a bucolic buggy ride. Ron Howard plays her impressionable adolescent son, for whom Books ultimately becomes a surrogate father figure and redeemer.
I’ll not lay a spoiler on you. Suffice it to say that Books’ decision to avoid the painful demise that Doc Hostetler has drawn for him, and the means he chooses to accomplish it, raise moral and ethical questions for many, but it has been a proper subject for serious debate since the time of Socrates.
Don Siegel directed The Shootist from a background of action movies like Dirty Harryand Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His background was as an editor, not a writer, and it shows in the meticulous, yet curiously bloodless, approach to what could have been a real masterpiece. But the film’s combination of cast and script, which was nominated for several awards for its screenplay (adapted from a roman a clef about real-life gunfighter John Wesley Hardin’s last days) make it a minor classic, and a valued part of my personal video library.
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Most folks over the age of 50 may recall Wayne’s politics, which he himself described as being to the right of Ronald Reagan, but it would be a mistake to take, as the sum of the man, the stereotype drawn from his politics and the flag-waving Vietnam-era war movies. Consider the portrayals of the xenophobic Indian-hater of The Searchers, the arrogant and obtuse cattle drive foreman of Red River, the prudish male chauvinist of The Quiet Man, the fanatical Naval commander of The Wings of Eagles, the hard-drinking but uncompromising protector of True Grit, and the gruff surrogate father to The Cowboys. These are subtle and complex performances that elevate Wayne’s oeuvre into the realm of the cinematic pantheon.
For most of his career, Wayne’s most memorable characters seemed to share a set of values that, while essentially conservative, were thoroughly part of the American mythology: personal honor and integrity, individualism, devotion to family, commitment, and responsibility. In his westerns, the West he represented was an imaginary land, a place of hope, compromised by death, but undiluted by vulgarity. He gave us myths built out of contradictory urges — the urge to settle down and the urge to move on; the need to be alone and the need to find community; the love of woman and the fraternity of men; strength and vulnerability. And through it all, it is John Wayne who stands astride all borders, at the veritable crossroads of our mythic universe, reconciling, in perhaps a dozen glorious performances, these conflicting ambiguities of which his political persona was but a crude distortion.
For me, one of the loveliest aspects of The Shootist is the affectionate and respectful friendship with Bacall’s Mrs. Rogers, which is never allowed to descend into a cloying Hollywood romance. Not that he never had on-screen romances. Look at Rooster Cogburn, the thinly veiled remake of The African Queen, in which his crusty retired U.S. Marshall was paired with Katherine Hepburn, or his work with Patricia Neal in In Harm’s Way. But how many maturing male stars will, even today, allow themselves to be paired with actresses who are roughly their contemporaries, rather than dropping down a generation or two? Does Woody Allen spring to mind?
From the vantage point of his own conservative Puritanism, he might look askance at these women, like the worldly-wise brothel operator played by Angie Dickenson in Rio Bravo, or the proud and outspoken Irish spinster played by Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man, but he would eventually learn the lessons of moral compromise through their instruction, and ultimately accept these self-defining women on their own terms.
In his later films, Wayne allowed himself to look old, and he even allowed himself to be killed. But he would never allow his characters to go down in disgrace and without purpose. As legacies go, it may not be timeless, but a man could do far worse.
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Retired lawyer and magistrate, Steve Taylor reviewed films for WHQR-FM, Wilmington, NC’s public radio station, from 1995 through 2007 as a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association. He now makes his homes in Philadelphia. PA and Walnut Creek, CA.
“The Skinny on Cooperative Householding” Review by Marilyn Hartman
My House, Our House: Living Far Better for Far Less in a Cooperative Household
by Karen M. Bush, Louise S. Machinist, and Jean McQuillin
St. Lynn’s Press (2013)
In 2004 three energetic, independent-minded women in their fifties pooled their financial resources to buy a house and form a cooperative household. Nine years later, they pooled their creative energies to write this engaging testament to the success of their endeavor. Beginning with an invitation to vicariously visit the home they call Shadowlawn, the three women let us into their lives and take us behind the scenes. As the book unfolds, they relate the events that brought them together, the steps they took to co-create a shared household, and their adventures in living together.
Woven into their tale is a guide to “cooperative householding” and a template that others can follow to establish their own shared living situation. The book details the issues that are important to address ahead of time and provides guidance on creating a legal partnership, on joint decision-making, and on laying down rules and guidelines for day-to-day living. The authors describe potential pitfalls to consider, as well as some of the conflicts that arose for them and how they resolved them. They candidly discuss the process they put in place to establish healthy personal boundaries and create a comfortable balance between independence and interdependence.
My House Our House additionally places their personal story into a larger social context. Since creating their cooperative household, the three women have educated themselves about the range of possible shared living arrangements and become active in the Cohouseholding Project. Their own website provides a list of resources where one can learn more about cooperative householding, cohousing, and other types of intentional community.
The success of Shadowlawn is evident. Karen, Louise, and Jean are not reticent about the challenges of living together, but the overwhelming themes are enthusiasm and a deep sense of contentment and appreciation for one another. It is a delightful story and a remarkable one. So much has been easy for them to work out. They have never had to assign household tasks, and their arrangements for sharing food and living expenses seem to work seamlessly. One has the feeling that the trust they developed early on enabled them to tackle the hard stuff with clear heads. The depth of their friendship has allowed them to accept with grace the compromises that have sometimes been necessary, while motivating them to work hard to find consensus on issues that matter deeply.
Of particular interest to me are the ways that the authors write about some of the larger questions: What are the benefits of forming a cooperative household? What does it mean to be simultaneously independent and interdependent? How much of cohouseholding is relevant to elders seeking ways to age in community? It is interesting to read what they say — and what they don’t say — about these questions.
The women describe their initial motivations for creating Shadowlawn as primarily economic and practical. It was obvious after doing some initial calculations that, compared to living alone, a cooperative household offered the possibility of living in a nicer house at a lower cost with the added advantage of sharing the burdens of home ownership and day-do-day household management. Indeed, living at Shadowlawn has allowed them to achieve a higher standard of living than otherwise would have been possible and to save more towards retirement.
There were also hints early on of other needs that would be met at Shadowlawn, as the women had come to acknowledge that their separate lives were sometimes lonely. Karen says it the best, writing that, “I had constructed a solitary world for myself, one where I was happy enough, but one that lacked the warmth and spontaneity of people living together.” These were three women who had careers that they loved and who were connected with friends and family, and yet they also experienced loneliness. It is hard to judge how much their desire for community factored into bringing them together, but it is fair to say that they did not fully anticipate the emotional and social benefits they would come to enjoy and value. Louise declares that she is a happier person now. “I love where, how, and with whom I’m living. In this special house, the spirit of shared adventure makes every day feel new and fresh.” Or in Jean’s words: “We have become sisters of the heart, completely trusting one another and accepting one another as we are, imperfect as that may be.”
In addition to communicating the joy of living together, these self-aware women reflect on how the need to accommodate their differences has helped them grow. There are amusing anecdotes of how they deal with aesthetic disagreements or incompatible views on dishrags versus sponges, and there is an especially long discussion of the lessons learned from downsizing. “Letting go of excess possessions, and sharing most of what remains, has actually felt liberating,” they write. And in describing her own journey, Karen says, “I’ve learned how to better fulfill my own value of helping other people. I’ve learned to be more attentive to and respectful of the views of other people.”
The relationship between the three women also seems to pivot around the meaning of the words “independent” and “interdependent.” They are critically important words, perhaps even the defining features of cooperative householding, and yet they are also difficult to pin down. From the first page, and in every chapter, these women declare they are independent, and they warn of the dangers of trying to create a shared living arrangement with “someone who needs your help.” They proclaim loudly that they do not need one another: “We do not expect to meet one another’s personal needs for happiness or companionship. We do not expect to be dependent on one another, although we can totally depend on one another.” What exactly does this mean?
A partial explanation emerges in the attitudes they express towards the idea of “dependency.” They admit they depend on one another but insist they are not “dependent.” They depend on one another to keep their cost of living low and to create a household that is easier to manage. They depend on one another for assistance in solving the problems that arise as homeowners, for deep camaraderie, and for a sense of community. And, despite their claims of independence, when one of them underwent surgery, the others provided nurturing care and practical caregiving assistance. There was no hesitation, no holding back. It’s not always clear in reading their book how to distinguish between interdependence and dependency. Nevertheless, the three women sometimes drew the line very sharply to protect their independence; there were multiple instances when help was offered and refused. “Sometimes it was annoying to be helped, because feeling capable and in control is very important to each of us.”
The book unfortunately does not delve more deeply, but it leaves the reader with the impression that for the authors, being “dependent” is a negative to be avoided at all costs. At its core, dependency seems to create the potential for being asked to do more than one is willing or able to do, and it arouses fear of not having a choice about whether to help. Here is an interesting statement they make about their current circumstances: “Because no one asks for too much help, it balances out perfectly.” It seems that dependency could potentially breed resentment, in contrast to interdependence, which supports “each person’s independence and competence.” But what would happen if one of the three women became unable to hold up their end of this bargain? There are many things in life that are not under our control, and despite our independent natures, we can become dependent on others. As we get older, the likelihood of this happening increases each year. What then?
For me this is the greatest disappointment of My House Our House, that the authors do not address the future and never fully consider the implications of aging for the cooperative householding model. At the writing of this book they are in their sixties, with at least one of them approaching 70. If they are lucky, they may have 10 or even 25 years of good health ahead of them, but they have not presented a vision of living together under circumstances when their capacity to be independent erodes, and their interdependence — or is it dependency? — grows. One can infer that these women would not accept help that is not freely given, and this is healthy, but they also do not offer a model of shared living that can accommodate situations of legitimate need.
And this is where the book ends, with the three women happy about their years together so far and enthusiastic about cooperative householding. When they look forward, they imagine continuing to live in a shared living situation, but so far Karen is the only one who has the beginning of a plan. She has purchased a condo in a location with easy access to activities of interest, and she expects to alter the house design to accommodate assistive technologies. She hopes that her current housemates will make the move with her. Yet there is no discussion of what it would be like to live together when their needs for assistance are greater, nor what kind of arrangements they would make when they need more help than they can provide one another.
So for the moment, Jean, Karen, and Louise have modeled for us how to create the strong bonds of community in a shared house, but we will need a sequel to answer the question, “What next?” It would be wonderful if these women were able to transform their model into an effective place to age in place, but it may fall to others to write that sequel. For now their adventure at Shadowlawn is inspiring and lovely, but it is not yet a blueprint for “happily ever after.”
//
Notes
1 See “The Roseto effect: a 50-year comparison of mortality rates” at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1695733/.
//
Marilyn Hartman has worked in the field of aging for many years, first as a faculty member in the Psychology Department at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and more recently as a consultant to several nonprofits that provide support to caregivers and the people they care for. She lives in Durham, NC and is interested in the intersecting threads of community-building, spiritual practice, service, and aging in place.
“A Village Far Outside Shanghai” A poem by Earl Cooper
they say you can get drunk here
simply from the air
this high in mountains
the geese never stop
you can hear them pass
all honk and appointment
during early light
the sounds their wings make
lifting and lifting
within the village
a woman begins to sweep stones
bathing them with dippersful of water
while on the roof of our hotel
an old man is gently
filling the sky with calligraphy
come, I say
let us walk out this morning
among the leaping green ridges of tea
and be like the air
that never ends
immortal as light
empty as this cup
50 Films for the Second Half of Life by Bolton Anthony
About Schmidt (2002) ♦ A man embarks on a post-retirement journey to his estranged daughter’s wedding only to discover more about himself and life than he ever expected. (U.S.) 125 minutes Directed by Alexander Payne Featuring Jack Nicholson, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, Kathy Bates BA
Amour (2012) ♦ (French with subtitles) 127 minutes Directed by Michael Haneke Featuring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva
Antonia’s Line (1995) ♦ A Dutch matron establishes and, for several generations, oversees a close-knit, matriarchal community where feminism and liberalism thrive. (Dutch with subtitles) 102 minutes Directed by Marleen Gorris Featuring Willeke van Ammelrooy, Jan Decleir, Veerle van Overloop BA
As It Is in Heaven (2004) ♦ A successful international conductor suddenly interrupts his career and returns alone to his childhood village in the far north of Sweden. (Swedish with subtitles) 132 minutes Directed by Kay Pollak Featuring Michael Nyqvist, Frida Hallgren, Helen Sjöholm BA
Atlantic City (1980) ♦ An aging low-level wise-guy and a young dreamer who needs his help to realize her dreams. (U.S.) 104 minutes Directed by Louis Malle Featuring Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon ST
Autumn Spring (2001) ♦ Terminal prankster Frantisek Hána refuses to grow up and take certain responsibilities, despite his wife Emilie’s constant badgering to do so. (Czech with subtitles) 95 minutes Directed by Vladimír Michálek Featuring Vlastimil Brodský, Stella Zázvorková BA
Away from Her (2006) ♦ (Canadian with subtitles) 110 minutes Directed by Sarah Polley Featuring Julie Christie, Michael Murphy, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) ♦ A group of older adults take up new lives in India, playing off one another’s pessimisms and optimisms. (British) 124 minutes Directed by John Madden Featuring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson JVB
Captain Abu Raed (2007) ♦ (Jordanian with subtitles) 102 minutes Directed by Amin Matalqa Featuring Nadim Sawalha, Rana Sultan
Central Station (1998) ♦ (Brazilian with subtitles) 113 minutes Directed by Walter Salles Featuring Fernanda Montenegro, Vinícius de Oliveira, Marília Pêra
Cherry Blossoms (2008) ♦ After Rudi’s wife Trudi suddenly dies, he travels to Japan to fulfill her dream of being a Butoh dancer. (German with subtitles) 127 minutes Directed by Doris Dörrie Featuring Elmar Wepper, Hannelore Elsner, Aya Irizuki BA
Cinema Paradiso (1988) ♦ Oscar winner about the boy who is befriended by an aging projectionist and acquires a lifelong love of movies. (Italian with subtitles) 155 minutes Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore ST
Departures (2008) ♦ A newly unemployed cellist takes a job preparing the dead for funerals. (Japanese with subtitles) 130 minutes Directed by Yôjirô Takita Featuring Masahiro Motoki, Ryôko Hirosue, Tsutomu Yamazaki BA
Driving Miss Daisy (1989) ♦ An old Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur in the American South have a relationship that grows and improves over the years. (U.S.) 115 minutes Directed by Bruce Beresford Featuring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd BA
Enchanted April (1992) ♦ The civilizing influence of Italy on beleaguered Londoners, both male and female. (British) 95 minutes Directed by Mike Newell Featuring Alfred Molina, Joan Plowright, Miranda Richardson BA
Feast of Love (2007) ♦ A meditation on love and its various incarnations, set within a community of friends in Oregon. (U.S.) 101 minutes Directed by Robert Benton Featuring Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Greg Kinnear BA
The First Grader (2010) ♦ An 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex-Mau Mau freedom insurgent fights for his right to go to school. (British) 103 minutes Directed by Justin Chadwick Featuring Oliver Litondo, Emily Njoki, Hannah Wacera BA
Footnote (2011) ♦ The moral confrontation between two Talmudic scholars: a son addictively dependent on academic acceptance, and his father, a stubborn purist. (Hebrew with subtitles) 103 minutes Directed by Joseph Cedar ST
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) ♦ Sentimental drama about two women growing up in the South in the 1920s who forge a life-long friendship. (U.S.) 130 minutes Directed by Jon Avnet Featuring Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson ST
Get Low (2009) ♦ Veteran actor Robert Duval’s backwoods Tennessee character purposefully redeems himself in the eyes of the community he has shunned for most of his life. (U.S.) 103 minutes Directed by Aaron Schneider Featuring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek JVB
Ginger and Fred (1986) ♦ A pair of aging second-tier vaudevillians are urged out of retirement to perform their Astaire-and-Rogers-inspired act one last time. (Italian with subtitles) 125 minutes Directed by Federico Fellini Featuring Marcello Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina ST
Gran Torino (2008) ♦ Clint Eastwood plays a crotchety elder thrown into a begrudging relationship with a vulnerable Hmong teenaged neighbor. (U.S.) 116 minutes Directed by Clint Eastwood JVB
Ground Hog Day (1993) ♦ (U.S.) 101 minutes Directed by Harold Ramis Featuring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell
Hope Springs (2012) ♦ An older couple spars over whether to resurrect lost intimacy in their relationship. (U.S.) 100 minutes Directed by David Frankel Featuring Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones JVB
Innocence (2000) ♦ (Australian) 94 minutes Directed by Paul Cox Featuring Julia Blake, Charles Tingwell
Is Anybody There? (2008) ♦ A charming look at the importance of an older man’s friendship with a young boy adrift in the throes of his parent’s rocky relationship. (British) 94 minutes Directed by John Crowley Featuring Michael Caine, Bill Milner JVB
Kolya (1996) ♦ The trials and tribulations — and loves — of a concert cellist in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. (Czech with subtitles) 105 minutes Directed by Jan Sverák BA
Last Orders (2001) ♦ A half-century in the lives of a group of South London buddies. (British) 109 minutes Directed by Fred Schepisi Featuring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay BA
Monsieur Ibrahim (2003) ♦ (French with subtitles) 95 minutes Directed by François Dupeyron Featuring Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) ♦ All but abandoned by her family in a London retirement hotel, an elderly woman strikes up a curious friendship with a young writer. (British) 108 minutes Directed by Dan Ireland Featuring Joan Plowright, Rupert Friend, Zoë Tapper BA
My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010) ♦ (French with subtitles) 83 minutes Directed by Jean Becker Featuring Gérard Depardieu, Gisèle Casadesus
Nobody’s Fool (1994) ♦ A rascally small-town ne’er-do-well approaching retirement age realizes, when his long-lost son moves back to town, that he has accomplished little in his life. (U.S.) 110 minutes Directed by Robert Benton Featuring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy ST
On Golden Pond (1981) ♦ Two Fondas and a Hepburn. Ten Oscar nominations. What’s not to like? (U.S.) 109 minutes Directed by Mark Rydell Featuring Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda ST
Quartet (2012) ♦ A retirement house full of older adults making music and at times resolving senior-sandbox behaviors. (U.S.) 98 minutes Directed by Dustin Hoffman Featuring Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, Billy Connolly JVB
Ran (1985) ♦ In this reimagining of King Lear, an elderly Japanese lord abdicates to his three sons, and the two corrupt ones turn against him. (Japanese with subtitles) 162 minutes Directed by Akira Kurosawa BA
Rhapsody in August (1991) ♦ An elderly woman living in Nagasaki tells her grandchildren about her husband’s death in the atomic bomb blast in August of 1945. (Japanese with subtitles) 98 minutes Directed by Akira Kurosawa ST
The Savages (2007) ♦ How two estranged siblings reconnect when they need to provide care for a father with dementia. (U.S.) 113 minutes Directed by Tamara Jenkins Featuring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman JVB
Schultze Gets the Blues (2003) ♦ An accordion player newly without work has his taste in music unexpectedly changed. (German with subtitles) 114 minutes Directed by Michael Schorr Featuring Horst Krause, Harald Warmbrunn BA
A Separation (2011) ♦ Weaves together the complexities of cultural and class values when an Iranian family needs to provide care for a father with Alzheimer’s. (Iranian with subtitles) 123 minutes Directed by Asghar Farhadi JVB
Shadowlands (1993) ♦ C.S. Lewis finds himself “surprised by Joy.” (British) 131 minutes Directed by Richard Attenborough Featuring Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, Julian Fellowes BA
The Shootist (1976) ♦ (U.S.) 100 minutes Directed by Don Siegel Featuring John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard
Still Mine (2012) ♦ (Canadian with subtitles) 102 minutes Directed by Michael McGowan Featuring James Cromwell, Ronan Rees, Geneviève Bujold
The Straight Story (1999) ♦ An old man makes a long journey by tractor to mend his relationship with an ill brother. (U.S.) 112 minutes Directed by David Lynch Featuring Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek BA
Strangers in Good Company (1990) ♦ A busload of women become stranded in an isolated part of the Canadian countryside. (Canadian with subtitles) 101 minutes Directed by Cynthia Scott Featuring Alice Diabo, Constance Garneau, Winifred Holden BA
Tender Mercies (1983) ♦ (U.S.) 100 minutes Directed by Bruce Beresford Featuring Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Betty Buckley
Trouble with the Curve (2012) ♦ A baseball scout, disgruntled with his own aging, is dogged by unfinished business with his adult daughter. (U.S.) 111 minutes Directed by Robert Lorenz Featuring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams JVB
Whales of August (1989) ♦ Two aging sisters who have vacationed together at a summer house on the coast of Maine for 50 years face an uncertain future. (U.S.) 100 minutes Directed by Lindsay Anderson Featuring Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price ST
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) ♦ A middle-aged bar hostess must choose to either get married or buy a bar of her own. (Japanese with subtitles) 111 minutes Directed by Mikio Naruse ST
Wild Strawberries (1957) ♦ (Swedish with subtitles) 91 minutes Directed by Ingmar Bergman Featuring Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin
Young@Heart (2007) ♦ A wonderfully engaging feature-length documentary about an older adult chorus that sings vibrant Rock songs, dispelling the myth that old age equals staid. (U.S.) 107 minutes Directed by Stephen Walker, Sally George JVB